Note: I wrote a piece for My Name is Me. It was not selected¹ so I will share it with you below. After you’re done, please go read this post.

I would love to live in a world where the wearing of a button which proclaims “I love butt-sex!” attracts no more attention in the grocery store than would one throwing support behind Team Edward. Unfortunately we do not yet live in that world, or at least I don’t.

As a teenager I was the strange bookish kid in a teenytiny town where any oddity was seen as a moral failing of oneself and one’s entire family. When that family overflowed with unchecked mental illness and sexual abuse, and when psychiatric help was impossibly far away, and when pastors and school counselors could not be trusted to keep confidentiality, the only options I saw were gouging lines into my legs with supersharp embroidery scissors or transferring dire thoughts out of my head and onto paper. A series of spiral-bound journals stacked up; these I would sort through from time to time, committing the oldest to flames. Even then I had plans for my work’s anonymity. I’m keeping these for a friend, I practiced saying in preparation for the day my mother would stumble upon my cache. Or It’s only fiction.

Eventually I broke free but the journals kept on coming. I’d write a stack then burn a stack, a pattern repeated through college, through my early married life, through the births of two children. But when that second child was a year old and my marriage was a tragedy wrapped in a pretense inside a torrent of seething resentment, I decided the content was too hot for paper pages. Thus was born my blog. Into it went not only the anger and frustration of dealing with (by then) three tiny children and a checked-out husband, but also all the sex I’d pushed down due to ridiculous, crappy parenting and throughout my entire marriage.

Lost amongst billions of other web pages, why, I thought, would anyone read mine? I’d forgotten one crucial fact: People like to read about sex, especially if it is written well — and once separated there was sex a’plenty, written as well as you’d expect from someone who’d spent her formative years hunched over notebooks with pen in hand. My readers cheered me on through new-found singlehoood, through dates, through explorations tentative and audacious in areas I’d previously only imagined — or seen in porn. The bolder my writing became the gladder I was that I’d made the decision to write anonymously, because while I was most sincerely enjoying my sextoys, my silicone lube and my buttsex, I felt fairly confident that my neighbors would not be so appreciative.

I am absolutely comfortable having shared nearly six years of my adventures with the world, but if those exploits were tied to my legal name they would cease to be shared. They would instead forced upon the people who share my name, and that’s just not fair to them. Should my pre-teen be teased in math class because her mom is, by society’s standards, a great big slut? Should my former husband have to endure speculation about his role in his ex-wife’s sexuality? I’d love it if everyone in the world were so secure with hir own boundaries and the boundaries of others that they could differentiate between my informed sexual choices and what those choices say about the character of the people in my life (read: little to nothing). So many of us can’t do that. We assume that the sins — the perceived sins — of the mother somehow pass down to her daughter. Or up to her parents.

I count among my friends and associates in online anonymity: educators who have too many times been confronted by parents angry that they helped their children receive honest, comprehensive sexuality information; BDSM enthusiasts whose exes would erroneously assume that an affinity for rope magically transforms one into an unfit parent; and sex workers who face online attacks that have grown even more relentless in the wake of Porn WikiLeaks. Sexbloggers, especially female sexbloggers, report falling victim to a phenomenon wherein people assume those who write about sex are also widely (and indiscriminately) available for sex, which is quite often the opposite of the truth. I know parenting bloggers who simply don’t want that one unbalanced reader to show up at the playgroun. These people have the right to speak truth about their lives without fear of harassment.

We all do.

Maybe some day I will be judged not on the sexual acts I practice (or with whom I practice them) but instead only on the quality of my character. Until then, I’ll talk about my colorful dating life (and buttsex) anonymously. I’ll be aag.

1. small sob [↩]

Ataraxia, a brainy friend of mine said about a photo I posted the other day, and so crazybusy was I what with work, preparations to speak in front of people at a college, kid-wranglin’, and the most basic human hygiene that I didn’t have a chance to do even cursory research into what it meant ’til today:

For the Epicureans, ataraxia was synonymous with the only true happiness possible for a person. It signifies the state of robust tranquility that derives from eschewing faith in an afterlife, not fearing the gods because they are distant and unconcerned with us, avoiding politics and vexatious people, surrounding oneself with trustworthy and affectionate friends and, most importantly, being an affectionate, virtuous person, worthy of trust.

For the Pyrrhonians, owing to one’s inability to say which sense impressions are true and which ones are false, it is the quietude that arises from suspending judgment on dogmatic beliefs or anything non-evident and continuing to inquire.

The words had barely sunk into my brain when it was time to go to the pool. Lately our routine has been thus: Pathetic keening complains over the application of sunscreen, jumping up and down exhortations to hurry mommy please hurry, then mad dives into the deep end with me fast upon their heels. I am meant to be a sort of living buoy, a safe island for little ones to paddle around like so many giggling ships and to be grabbed upon when the ability to float wanes. A moment of peace came that day when they stroked toward the edge en masse and put their heads, two curly blond and one sleek brunette, together. And then they were off to the slides, tossing instructions over honey-brown shoulders to stay in the pool and wait without moving, Mom, stay there!

This time I did, and not only because I forgot my book on the bedside table and would have had nothing to do in my deckchair but FWP¹ and envy the other mothers. A brutal heatwave had broken the night before in an hours-long thunderstorm. This had the dual benefits of bringing up the water to the very rim as well as allowing the populace to luxuriate in their own homes’ cool air instead of making the heat-drenched and surly trek to the pool. Kids gone I was the only person left; the lone lifeguard looked at me with what seemed like pity and I sunk to my chin in the coolness.

There are so few moments of real rest for the mother. Even under the protection of another — whether father, teacher or lifeguard — tentacles² of concern radiate out. And yet they were almost the only ones there, surrounded by professionals. They didn’t need me. This was as ataraxia-like as it got.

But I’m always scheming, always planning ahead. Since January my eldest and I have been deep in a tour of preteen-friendly media, a tour whose purpose is to give her philosophy to carry her through these next several turbulent years. We’ve made our way through this and this and are now, at her request, watching this. But when, it’s been occurring to me lately to wonder, when is the appropriate moment to introduce her to this, without which no education can be considered truly complete? How can you act like an adult if not for the example of Winston Wolfe? How can you understand the dynamics of the foot massage without this conversation playing in your head? How can you be rounded without wondering how well Jules succeeded in trying to be the good shepherd?

Surely it is not appropriate to show such a film to one under eighteen — and even without the blood and violence and splattered brains what child of that age would understand a non-linear narrative highlighting the differences between our protagonists’ paths? More to the point, how could I dream of introducing her to The Bride, who, I believe, should be absolutely required study for anyone audacious enough to love, for who hasn’t at some point felt the swirl of admiration, adoration and absolute hatred she felt for Bill? Who hasn’t?

But by the time I saw that film it was too late. I could see my past in The Bride but the art was too late to inoculate me against future hurt. Will I get the opportunity to give this to my child? When, in the narrow window between eighteen and the-time-she-leaves-the-house, will it be right?

I picture Christmas 2019, shoving aside wrapping paper and young ‘uns to demand that she watch with me, for surely by the time she’s twenty she’ll have had her heart cracked open enough to understand. I gave her Buffy in time, I think, in time that the lessons are in place when she’ll need them. “Oh,” I want her to think when the time comes. “Someone else has gone through this. So many someone-elses have had this happen to them that they wrote a show about it. Buffy made it, and I will too.”  I hope she finds the rest in time, and it both thrills and terrifies me to think of how very much philosophy she will have to acquire without my assistance.

These thoughts are not conducive to ataraxia.

And then they came back, neon-hued streaks down the side of the pool screaming into the water all around me. “You waited for us,” they babble. “We told you to wait and you waited for us!”

And I say, Yes. Yes I did.

1. fiddle with phone [↩]
2. This word has only the most positive connotations for me. [↩]

Three months have passed since MOMENTUMCon ended and, at the urging of a friend, I began a little experiment in which each and every day there is posted upon Facebook a picture I have taken of myself.

I know! It’s almost unbearably self-indulgent! But there is a purpose to this, which is to give future generations pictures to remember me by — however, given the fact that last night my eldest flung into my room a Buffy tshirt I had just bought her, thereby, one assumes, breaking up with me, I am not entirely convinced that posterity will be kind to these images — and also to shore up my sadly flagging confidence.

How could it have flagged so far? You’re not the only one to wonder:

I profess to be surprised at finding that you – someone who had the confidence in herself to divorce, taking primary custody with no traditional full time job, and then to build a business, buy/refinance her house – have such little confidence in your looks.

To me this is not surprising at all. Who among us is anything but a dizzying mix of bold and bashful, confident and crushed, self-possessed and in an agony of insecurity every moment of every day? And yet something has changed over the course of making these ninety images. Whereas at first I cowered behind child or pet, edged almost out of frame by something exponentially cuter than my wrinkly self, now I’m taking up a greater portion of the picture. Often the lighting is strong enough for the viewer to make out actual features and not just a vaguely humanoid blob. Sometimes I even put on lipgloss.

Throughout I’ve managed — somehow! — neither to horrify my friends¹ nor to grind Facebook to a halt with images of such surpassing ugliness that all flee in their wake. I can look at the folder not with clenched teeth and through my fingers but with the dispassionate eye of being ever so slightly more at peace with my physical presence than I was even three months ago. I am neither as lovely as I remember at twenty-two nor as hideous as I feared at forty-two.

I can live with this.

1. Erm. I think they are not horrified? [↩]